


Losing Touch

by hopeassassin



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Catch all the signs of their feelings for each other, Cigarettes, Dai-chan leaves for the States after graduation, F/M, How does one tag effectively here, I don't even know anymore, Post-High School, They will always be together, This is my take on what happens when they part briefly, This is the aftermath, absence makes the heart grow fonder, future setting, if you do you are my new favourite person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeassassin/pseuds/hopeassassin
Summary: He’s convinced that even if he wasn’t a professional athlete, he’d be just as strongly against this. It’s a horrible habit to have.Still, the fact remains: after they graduate from Touou, Satsuki starts smoking.





	Losing Touch

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone kept apologizing for taking a more convoluted and/or figurative look at the prompts for the AoMomo week back in the day, but I think it’s something that should be embraced, rather than reasoned. :D So, here’s my take on day 6’s prompt.
> 
> Day 6: Touch.

When she first picks up the habit, after they graduate from high school, Daiki’s reaction is immediate and  _strong_.

He’s convinced that even if he wasn’t a professional athlete, he’d be just as strongly against this.

It’s a horrible habit to have, he thinks, and no amount of romanticising publicity tries to give it will change that.

Still, the fact remains: after they graduate from Touou, Satsuki starts smoking.

At first it’s only one cigarette every other day, ‘to give her day a kick-start’.

He frowns at her lame excuses. He frowns because he feels that they’re exactly that: excuses that she gives to herself more than to him. Excuses that she tries to sell him just to get his judgemental look off her back.

It would be a cold day in hell before Aomine Daiki ever gave up easily.

He keeps giving her sermons well into the summer, about how bad an idea it is for her to keep smoking. He keeps telling her there must be better ways to waste her money than giving them for cigarettes.

He keeps insisting that if she continues smoking one to start her day, soon she’ll be smoking a pack a week as a pick-me-up. Before she knows it, it will be out of hand, he tells her, trying to make her see the light.

She doesn’t listen.

When has she ever?

He tells her, angrily so, that he’ll never approve of this, hoping it might be enough to discourage her from the brewing bad habit.

It doesn’t.

He reminds her that her parents would be displeased when they find out. He refuses to help her keep it a secret from them. He chooses to angrily storm out of the room whenever her mother recognizes the faint leftover smell of cigarette smoke the aerosol spray hasn’t managed to erase completely.

They keep arguing about it as the weeks pass and turn into months.

Then the end of summer comes, and Daiki needs to leave.

It has been decided since before they graduated from high school that he is to go to America on a basketball scholarship. People will be willing to pay big money to see him play, the scout had said, so it would be unwise to say no.

So he doesn’t.

At the beginning of September, Daiki leaves for the States.

* * *

 

He spends three years in America, coming home only for a few weeks in the winters, because during his summer vacations he has games back to back.

Being so far, it’s difficult to maintain a miffed countenance. Especially since all the factors about her smoking get eliminated because of the distance: he can neither see her smoke, nor smell it on her when he’s only talking to her on Skype or on the rare occasion he calls her on the phone.

She’s his best friend, so he knows better than to let her smoking get in the way of their bond. However, the time zone differences and the fact that she has her own life in Japan, while he has his in America, makes him feel like they’re slowly but certainly losing touch.

Arguing about the deepening of her smoking habits becomes a habit in its own right. He only asks her about it in passing when they talk online, a stray thought brought to his mind from seeing someone smoke on TV or something like it.

The more time passes, the less compelled Satsuki feels to make up excuses for her vice.

She stops hiding the fact she smokes from her parents. She takes the brunt of their disapproval like a trooper. Her nicotine intake jumps to at least three cigarettes on a good day when she’s not getting stressed by circumstances.

This automatically means that all her clothes are permeated with the stench, practically all the time.

Whenever he comes home in the winter, Daiki is set upon waging a verbal war with his friend over her smoking. He refuses to accept her descent into the dark depths of chain smoking as long as he has strength in him to keep arguing with her about it.

The more time passes, the less Satsuki responds to his claims and sermons. At times, it seems like she was tuning him out, simply awarding him with a lackadaisical smile once he’s done lecturing her.

And, in time, the former Touou ace figures out that the cause is long lost.

He realizes he’s just wasting his breath trying to make her see the errors of her ways. Better yet, he becomes aware she  _knows_ the errors of her ways, but still continues doing the same things.

So he stops complaining about it to her. He stops trying to convince her, because he knows he can’t. She’s made her decision, and nothing he does is going to change it. He knows that.

The fact he stops commenting on it doesn’t change his view on it, though.

He still thinks she looks ridiculous with that cigarette sticking out from between her lips. He still finds it grotesque when she breathes out the cloud of smoke with every dip.

It’s a vice that suits her ill, he believes. Even if you forget about the health issues connected with smoking, the fact the stench clings to your clothes, your hair, your  _skin_  still remains.

It’s not like he mourns the drowning of her natural odour in the stench of cigarettes or something.

* * *

After his three-year contract expires, Daiki doesn’t renew it. He chooses to return to Japan, where he makes it to the National team within the first few months after he’s back to the country.

He enjoyed basketball in the states in a way he never had at home. He had a lot more worthy opponents there, so his career benefitted a lot from his stay.

But it was a different country with a much different culture.

He never managed to start feeling at home there.

The more time passed, the more deep-seeded this feeling became.

He felt ill at ease. He felt like he didn’t belong. The only places that feeling dispersed a little was when he was playing.

Yet he couldn’t be constantly on the court. He had to eat, sleep and unwind lest he wanted to hurt himself.

In the end, the pressure of the foreign culture proved too great for Daiki. He discovered that he was a lot more homebound than he’d ever believed himself to be.

So it’s with his head held high and a light heart that he returns to his home country on the eve of his twenty-first birthday.

* * *

Little has changed after he comes back from the States.

Although Satsuki no longer lives with her parents at the house, she lives just a little ways away from Daiki’s apartment in Tokyo, one he shares with Ryou.

He knows from their little chats on Skype that she’s in her last year of university. She’s studying to become some kind of journalist or writer – he never really knew which of the two.

All that he’s absolutely sure of is that she’s nurturing the talents she found way back in Teikou as far as information analysis goes.

He drops by her place often when he has the time. He didn’t come back to Japan because of her, but the feeling of losing touch with her had definitely bothered him hugely at the time he’d been abroad.

Being around her often, though, means that he’s once again encountered with the fact Satsuki’s a smoker.

She always offers him a drink when he comes by, and she always lights a cigarette with her own coffee. It makes the stink of cigarettes more prominent, refreshing the stale air with new fumes.

He glares at her over his mug while she finishes writing her paper on the laptop, the small white cylinder sticking out from her mouth.

“Do you really have to smoke inside? It feels like even the walls reek of cigarettes,” he grumbles irately.

His complaint makes her look up from the screen.

She smiles ambiguously, tilting her head to the side a little. She takes a deep dip from the cigarette before pinching it between her middle and index finger out of her mouth to speak.

“Well, I live alone. I don’t even notice it anymore, and it doesn’t bother anyone. I don’t see why not.”

He glares at her without saying another word while her dainty fingers tap the cigarette. His eyes keep following her hand as she carefully places it between her lips, exhaling a puff of smoke with a placid expression.

Daiki looks away, angrily sipping at his coffee.

He feels endlessly miffed that years and years of being exposed to media romanticising of a vice have led him to think she appears somewhat graceful with her hand to her mouth like that.

* * *

Daiki can cite a dozen reasons behind his dislike for Satsuki’s smoking.

One of the leading ones, however, he will never breathe a word of aloud.

How can he? It would definitely sound weird.

After all, what would  _you_ think if your best friend since  _a lifetime_ says he can’t stand your vice because it draws his attention and focus to the flawless curve of your wrist, to how dainty and fine your fingers look as they curl around the smoke, to how your lips wrap around the cylinder of the cigarette filter?

It’s weird. It’s totally weird, so there’s no way he can tell her this.

Not verbalizing it, however, doesn’t change the truth it holds.

When she takes a cigarette in her mouth, eyebrows scrunching together in concentration as she types away at her laptop, unblinking gaze pinned to the monitor, he can’t tear his eyes away from the way her lips purse around the smoke.

He bates his breath when she exhales, and not only because he dislikes the reek of tobacco—he  _does_ —but also because there’s something distinctly refined and  _special_ about the way she flicks her wrist with the cigarette scissored between her index and middle fingers.

Most of all he hates the fact that he can’t look away, even when he’s trying. His eyes keep returning to the taut line of her lips as she thinks feverishly about her next line. His gaze is glued to the way she leans on one arm, while with the other she cradles the cigarette to her mouth.

He wonders, sometimes, why this all is happening to him.

Because there’s no way he’s jealous of inanimate objects getting more Satsuki action than he ever would.  _No way_. That’s definitely  _not it_.

Yet he finds himself, day after day, more drawn to—to  _something_ , something he cannot name.

Before he realizes it, his hands—with a mind seemingly of their own—have procured a cigarette from Satsuki’s pack one lazy Saturday afternoon.

He rolls it around his fingers, experimentally, feeling the texture of it under his fingertips. A frown graces his features. Still, he presses on, putting the cigarette in his mouth the way he’s seen Satsuki do a thousand times before.

He finds the object foreign and vaguely unpleasant between his lips. The feel of the filter’s material is weird in his mouth.

He ignores that as he reaches for her lighter.

Satsuki is right around the corner, just out of her bathroom—her hair still dripping wet—when she sees him in her kitchen, taking a dip out of a lit cigarette.

His body recoils violently to his experiment, forcing him into a coughing fit immediately after he takes a deep drag.

“What are you  _doing_ , Dai-chan?” Satsuki chides, laughter bubbling in her voice as she sits across from him.

There’s a doting smile stretching her lips and he feels like a little boy caught doing something he shouldn’t when she looks at him like that, speaks to him in that tone. She watches him a while longer as he wheezes, trying to get himself together.

She shakes her head and reaches out to take the cigarette from his fingers.

Her small, soft hand brushes against his as she does so. He doesn’t understand, but it makes something warm and pleasant,  _teasing_ , spread in his chest.

He doesn’t protest when she takes the cigarette from his amateur hold. There’s something different in the way—maybe the ease with which she does it?—she holds it from the way he emulates her holding it.

For some reason it takes his breath away.

She shakes her free hand’s index finger at him reproachfully—like you would with a troublesome pet, or a small child.

“You shouldn’t smoke, Dai-chan. You’re a professional athlete. It might reflect badly on you.”

She takes a deep, blissful drag out of the cigarette, her eyes fluttering closed as she does. She holds in the breath, then exhales slowly through her parted lips the small puff of smoke.

It’s like he’s mesmerized as he looks into her magenta eyes, clouded in contentment.

“It doesn’t suit you at all,” she tells him kindly, with a smile that whisks his thoughts away.

He can’t take his eyes off her mouth wrapped around the cigarette’s filter—the same place his lips had been not even a few seconds ago.

And he really  _does_ feel like a child, feeling exhilarated over such miniscule, inconsequential things.

* * *

He knows his fascination is getting a little out of hand when he buys a pack of her favourite brand where she can’t see or stop him from trying it.

He knows he’s probably wrong and things are getting  _more than a little_ out of hand when Kagami looks at him in shell-shocked horror and represses the urge to slap the cigarette out of his hands as he brings it to his mouth.

“Aomine, what the hell are you  _doing_?” the redhead demands to know, because he knows well Daiki’s stand about smoking.

He knows, because he’s heard him complain every single time his attempts at dissuading Satsuki have fallen flat of their objective.

And as he coughs his lungs out, Daiki starts coming back to his senses. He starts resurfacing from a trance brought on by ever-present fumes and omitted truths and complex feelings he can’t, for the life of him, figure out in their entirety.

He scowls severely, looking critically at the hand with which he held the slowly smouldering cigarette.

What  _is_ he doing, grasping at straws to find something he shares with Satsuki as an interest again? What is he  _doing_ , doing something he  _hates_ , simply for the purpose of comforting himself that he isn’t drifting from her, that he isn’t losing touch?

“What the fuck am I doing?” he murmurs aloud, stomping the cigarette underfoot and stuffing the pack in his pocket. He takes his anger out on the box, grabbing it tight enough to deform the carton.

That evening he drops by Satsuki’s with a gift he’s never before made her and he swears to himself he will never again make her.

It annoys him how happy she is to receive the almost full pack. He’s a little grateful that she doesn’t say anything about the fact it’s already opened. He’s sure she notices that there’s one cigarette missing, but she doesn’t question him.

He’s thankful for that but he’s still upset. He’s not entirely sure why, but he knows he can’t bear to look at her right then.

He evades her gaze the entire time during his visit, keeping his eyes pinned to the back of her laptop, to the bustling city outside her window, to the slowly dripping droplets of water in her sink.

She notices he’s acting peculiar but doesn’t call him out on it. She lets him be, deciding that if he had something to say to her, he’d come out with it eventually.

The only time he looks at her that night is when he bids goodbye to her at her door before it swings closed.

* * *

He doesn’t drop by for a while after that night. It makes Satsuki a bit antsy, and ups her nicotine intake. She keeps going over and over in her mind whether it’s something she’s done or said that has upset him.

Relief floods her system when on the tenth day after his last visit, there’s a ring at her door and she finds him standing behind it when she opens it.

His brows are creased in the way they usually do when he’s aggravated. His face betrays the exhaustion he must be feeling. There’s a certain paleness to his complexion, and it suggests that he’s been in his foul mood for a while now.

He doesn’t even attempt to smile as he greets her and asks her if it’s okay for him to come in.

He’s unusually quiet while he sips on the coffee she offers him. She watches him curiously over her hand holding the cigarette.

“Dai-chan, are you ok? You look kind of out of it,” she says worriedly, scrutinizing him from the side.

His gaze lifts up to give her a disgruntled look.

“What are you talking about? I’m perfectly fine,” he lies through his teeth, going back to ignoring her.

Satsuki sighs slowly through her nose, surveying him critically. She leans against the palm of the hand she holds her cigarette in.

“Really?” she echoes unconvinced. “Because it feels like you’re upset with me about something.”

Daiki scoffs, and she notes that even then he doesn’t look at her. Her lips purse as her body starts wiring with tension.

“I’m not  _upset_ with you,” he spits out flippantly, as though the mere suggestion of it is an affront. “Where’d you get that idea?”

She rolls her eyes and holds in the tired sigh.

“You used to drop by every other day. Now it’s been over a week since the last time you showed up. And you’ve been so weird ever since…” Her voice trails off, somewhat shyly.

Their gazes lock for a moment when he chances a glance at her face. He snorts, azure orbs flickering away from hers immediately.

“What does it matter? You’re busy anyway. It doesn’t make a difference whether I’m here or not,” he grumbles irately, piercing glower stuck to the far wall.

Satsuki’s brows rise over her eyes as understanding dawns on her.

A slow smile splays over her face.

It’s not that he’s upset, she finally understands.

He’s sulking.

It all finally starts making sense.

And she is at ease once more.

* * *

He’s hunched over at the entrance of her apartment, tying the shoelaces of his sneakers. She’s watching him with a kind expression on her face, a small smile playing upon her lips, as he gets ready to leave.

“Dai-chan?” she starts once his shoes are securely on his feet.

“What?” he asks, not turning around to look at her.

Still sulking. She smiles, instead of feeling annoyed—like she perhaps should.

She kneels behind his hunched form, wrapping her arms gently around him in a warm embrace. She feels him stiffen in her hold, and her smile stretches.

She presses the side of her face against his, her cheek aligned with his temple. Her fingers tighten their hold on his shoulders, pulling him further into her hug.

“I’ll leave the window open more,” she says softly against him, tender gaze pinning to his feet that were the first thing in her line of sight. “I promise I won’t smoke inside the apartment anymore.”

She hears and feels his breath still. Her eyes slide shut as she presses herself more snugly against his back.

“So drop by more often, okay?”

When he starts breathing again, it’s with a shallow, haphazard rhythm. She hears him swallow harshly in her hold.

She loosens her hold on his shoulders enough to allow him to turn around to look at her.

There’s an expression so full of innocent wonder and trepidation written across his face that she can’t keep herself from leaning forward to plant a kiss against his parted in wonder lips.

“Okay,” he whispers against her mouth before drawing her in for another kiss.

She tastes like coffee and cigarettes but that’s okay. Daiki doesn’t mind.

As long as her vice is his only competition for her attention and her lips, he can make his peace with her smoking.

**Author's Note:**

> So I have two smokers in my house. That’s how the notion of this story was born.
> 
> Also, grown up Satsuki is even sharper and quicker on the uptake than teen Satsuki, because I think she should be. Grown up Daiki feeling hyped about indirect kisses because it’s adorable and he’s a dork like that, regardless how old he gets.
> 
> I’m oddly proud of this one, to be honest. :C 
> 
> (2 years later notes: And the fact it didn't receive much attention from the people in this tiny fandom for this pairing was most probably the reason I withdrew from writing for this pair. Ehhh, fickle is the woman's heart as the Japanese say. :D Oh, well. At least I finally got around to posting it here, so, yay!)


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